Top 10 Slurm Mistakes That Kill Cluster Performance

Slurm is designed to make efficient use of cluster resources. But in practice, a few common mistakes can quietly destroy performance — not just for one user, but for the entire cluster. The tricky part is that most of these don’t cause failures. Jobs still run… just slower, inefficiently, or at the cost of others. Here are 10 of the most common Slurm mistakes and how to fix them. 1. Over-Requesting Resources The Problem Requesting more CPUs, memory, or GPUs than needed. #SBATCH --cpus-per-task=3